It’s officially done. Musk will buy Twitter for $44 billion and await regulatory approval to take the company private after the deal closes.
The move raises some questions about Twitter’s future, such as whether Musk will change its practice of censoring content, and whether it will bring some banned users such as former US President Trump back (although Trump has said he will not Twitter).
Billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos raised his questions. His biggest concern is whether Musk will let the Chinese government influence Twitter because of Tesla. Bezos chose to tweet the question on Monday, and it couldn’t be more appropriate to ask it here.
Musk and Bezos, the two richest men on the planet, have always had a tense relationship. Both run private space companies and compete for the same contracts.
Bezos’s question about China was responded to in a tweet by New York Times reporter Mike Forsythe, who pointed out that in 2021, China is Tesla’s second-largest market, and the electric car giant also relies on batteries produced in China. .
China blocked Twitter in 2009. But China is known to protect its image abroad, forcing big companies operating in the country to change content critical of the Chinese government. Major tech companies such as Apple (AAPL) must store data on Chinese users domestically and give the government access to them or anger officials.
Companies such as Disney (DIS) and even the NBA are censoring themselves so they don’t gain or lose Chinese officials and hurt them in a lucrative market.
Although China has banned Twitter, it will still be on the lookout for any dissidents or users on the site who raise concerns about human rights abuses in the country, including the use of concentration camps in Xinjiang.
If Tesla relies on China to boost sales, Chinese officials could theoretically pressure Musk to censor anti-China government content or risk losing the ability to operate publicly in the country.
It’s a question worth discussing, especially since Musk and co-founder Jack Dorsey characterize Twitter as a “public square.”
But Bezos’ tweet may also have his own intentions hidden. Its aerospace company Blue Origin lost out to Musk’s SpaceX in a NASA bid to build a lunar lander for NASA’s future mission to send astronauts to the moon. Blue Origin filed a lawsuit against the decision, but it ultimately failed.
After that, though, Congress called for a second bid for the lander, giving Bezos and Blue Origin another chance to help put Americans on the moon. The two billionaires are also arguing over which company’s airliner flies higher and where the line that separates space from Earth is.
So while Bezos raises the important question of how Musk separates Tesla and Twitter, it’s worth considering why he’s raising the topic.
